Nobody needs to read this.
I just needed to type it out.
Yeah it's a combination of the shortened days and the loss of my son.
I try to spend as much time as I can outside, and focus on the positive, and the day after the winter solstice I tell myself I'm going to start feeling better soon. It's sort of my mile marker. (Just like chickens).
"Chit", as some of my friends here call it, was going down that last Christmas before he died and I was trying to take care of my family and 3 other kids and also help him deal with his issues long distance. (He was several states away).
The mental health system in this country is torturous for patients and family members alike.
If you have a kid with any kind of mental health problems, once they turn 18 it is almost impossible to assist them unless they are willing to sign the release forms to allow conversation between their parents and their doctors.
The problem with these laws stem from the fact that once a person is in the throes of a mental health crisis they often don't trust their parents either and won't sign.
I spent that Dec. and Jan. driving back and forth because he was in a psychotic crisis.
I was trying to get him admitted to a facility post an unsuccessful suicide attempt, faced seven rejections then finally got him in first a hospital, then transferred to a different hospital with a psych department, then a mental healthcare hospital, scheduled for a 30 day stay! (and a good one at that)
Woo-hoo!
Visitation was 30 minutes once a day in a community room setting.
He was not himself to say the least.
After a few days I had to rush back to my town for a job interview that couldn't be pushed back again. I was only going to be gone for less than 24 hrs.
My plan?
Literally drive 10 hrs, Catch a nap, interview, then drive back. The doctor assured me that Nick was safe, improving, and not even eligible for release for at least the next five days. He urged me to go because it was important to the rest of my family.
That night, late, driving home , my cell phone rang.
It was an unfamiliar number.
I answered it.
It was my son.
To this day I don't know how he got the use of a phone.
He called me by my first name instead of the usual Mom.
"Stacey, this is Nicholas.
I want you to listen carefully because this is the last time you will ever hear my voice."
I was coming up on an exit, one of the ones on the southern outskirts of rocky mount NC on I-95 North. I took that exit to try to find a spot to stop and sit so I could concentrate on what he was saying because it was crazy. He was crazy. But I got lost and eventually wound up in the parking lot of (oh, such irony) a hospital!
He told me he hated me for admitting him. For interfering. For not bringing him home for Christmas. (Couldn't. We were broke.)
And that I was no longer his "mother" and that he would never speak to me again as long as he lived.
I tried to keep him on the phone as long as I could.
I was hoping a nurse or doctor or SOMEBODY would discover him and take him back to his room.
Settle him down.
He didn't even have phone priveledges.
When he hung up I was such a wreck.
I tried to call back.
No answer.
Can't remember much after- other than being lost in the dark and it taking forever to find the highway again and standing in a gas station pouring coffee and sobbing while paying.
I drive through on I-95 North a few times a year and passing that area I am awash with feelings. The kind of feelings that you can't even narrarate with words. I always end up crying.
The next morning I found out from his girlfriend that they let him sign himself out.
I never found out why or how this happened.
I also never heard his voice again except in a weird recurring dream I have.
He is walking down the stairs in our old house. He's sliding his right hand along on the clear maple railing and walking slowly.
One step at a time.
The sun is coming in through the skylight and bouncing off the wall next to him.
My wildflower photography lines that wall.
It is beautiful in the sun in their stark black frames.
His hair is shiny. Looks fresh from the shower wet. Towel dried.
I see his mouth moving but all I hear is the purest, dullest, silence. Absolute absence of sound, except for two words, but they are crisp and clear. Like in-a-sound-booth-with-headphones-on, clear.
He says:
"Your son."
Nick left us on feb. 7th.
The holidays bring back a lot of these memories for me like PTSD on a loop.
Aren't I just a bundle of fricking joy?
We were always super close prior to his illness.
And yes. I've talked to a counselor, a psychic,
And a "shaman healer" who left a thriving job as a psychiatrist to go on a different healing path ...
Insert eye roll here.
I am still processing her "visions" to this day.
That was the winter I sat in the snow and cold and wind and freezing rain on a granite stoop, with my back up against a barn a century past due its collapse. I was in the middle of a filthy chicken yard, owned by a friend of a friend with my eyes closed listening to the chickens talk amongst themselves and occasionally taking pictures.
They saved me.
Ultimately, you might say they brought me here.
